An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn’t a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged than others, but that hasn’t anything to do with being young. And being young is terrible sometimes. Don’t you remember how terrible it could be?

from An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
by P.D. James
Scribner Paperback Edition, 2001

Mannequin

Anything is possible. God made the world that way so that we might find within us the urge to do right, not wrong.

from Mannequin
by J. Robert Janes
Soho Press, 1994

Shroud for a Nightingale

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying him, don't you think?

from Shroud for a Nightingale
by P.D. James
Scribner Paperback Edition, 2001

The Jasmine Trade

On the desk where he had been sitting were four tiny but perfect works of origami, as if a magician had been sitting there, transforming a reporter's dross into art. An angular cat. A bird. A frog. And a dagger. Put them together and you had some twisted nursery rhyme.

from The Jasmine Trade
by Denise Hamilton
Scribner, 2001